64 Dante’s contemporary, the curialist and adviser to Boniface VIII, Giles of Rome,65 abandons his own youthful, more moderate political theories dealt with so thoroughly in his lengthy treatise De regimine principum (On the Rule of Princes),66 to cite Hugh in his hastily composed De ecclesia potestate (On Ecclesiastical Power) of circa : “As Hugh [of St. l. 72 Thus, while Philip’s men had been toiling in Paris, so in the years – and thereafter, there poured from the Roman curia and elsewhere a storm of treatises and pamphlets defending papal plenipotency.

L. , Dedication ), even blithely and capriciously ignoring the times when the poet meticulously adheres to the methods, thought, and distinctions of the authorities he employs. In dialectic, exercised as lively disputatio, the aim of participants, following strict, obligatory norms, was to continue debate, to find inconsistencies, and to make wrangling distinctions ad infinitum. In every field dialectic became vitriolic: polemicists scored points by attending to abstractions often quite divorced from concrete experience.

Americans”) that is the subject of the conclusion. The “middle term” (A; terminus medium) must be common to both, and that term (“humans” above, actually used as a principle) is excluded from the conclusion—that is, in the simplest form, all A (middle term) is C (major term); all B (minor term) is A; therefore, all B (minor term) is C (major term). Error enters, for example, if there are more than three terms in the first two premises. This violation of the basic rule of structure of the syllogism is called “the fallacy of four terms” (quaternio terminorum);45 for example, were I to use a word for the middle term in a double or ambiguous sense, I would actually be surreptitiously introducing a fourth term (and thus changing my basic principle) to produce an invalid consequent.